Archive: Marvin

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Curtis, 3/1/24

The weird thing about arrested-in-time strips like Curtis is that we, who have been reading this strip for decades, have internalized the rhythms of the family dynamics and recognize today’s episode as one of an infinite number of subtle variations of the “Curtis asks his dad for money” gag. But Curtis, in theory, is only 11 for a year or so, and in a strange way he’s experienced much less of his own life than we have, and so can’t predict what’ll happen next. Look at his smile in panel two! “Throw his money out a window?” he’s thinking. “What a charmingly odd idea! Not sure where he’s going with this but I’m sure I’ll have some cash in my pocket by the end of it.” Anyway, Curtis, have you considered getting a Spotify subscription? They have Six-ribs’ whole catalog, along with a huge number of other hip-hop artists, and 60 bucks could get you six months!

Marvin, 3/1/24

It took me a minute to figure out, but I think the joke here is supposed to be “The dog, who should not be eating people food, will end up eating the meatloaf, because someone will be surreptitiously feeding it to him, ha ha!” But this is a strip where dogs and babies have adult human-level cognition, so don’t they shouldn’t act like we’re supposed to be surprised or amused that they might eat adult human food. Anyway, my initial read on this was that the joke was about the dog not wanting to fill the house with horrible odors vented from his bowels, which would at least be kind of a twist for this strip.

Mary Worth, 3/1/24

Toby is truly one of my favorite ancillary Mary Worth character. Unlike Wilbur, she’s used sparingly enough so that it’s a true delight when she occasionally shows up and says things like “I want to take up cooking, which my husband would love, but my neighbor up the hall, who rarely cooks for us, is so much better than me at it, so why bother?” This would be hilarious even if the thing the lady up the hall had just dished out wasn’t the most disgusting brown glop you could possibly imagine. Anyway, Mary is being either incredibly kind or incredibly sarcastic when she calls Toby “a talented artist and a great friend,” because she definitely isn’t the former and I’d be willing to bet quite a bit that she’s isn’t the latter either.

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Rex Morgan, M.D., 2/26/24

Every once in a while, the Rex Morgan, M.D., creative team remembers the “M.D.” part of the strip title and realizes they’re supposed to be doing medical or medical-adjacent storylines. Unfortunately, they hate that, so they make them as boring as possible to ensure that we don’t demand more of them. Healing is mostly sitting around and not doing anything, if you think about it, and is that what you want to read about in a comics strip? When you could be getting more juicy gossip about what sort of drama goes on within the roots country community? I think not.

Marvin, 2/26/24

Every once in a while, the Marvin creative team remembers that they do a daily strip where the primary joke is that the main character, a baby with adult-level cognition, pisses and shits himself constantly, and enjoys it, and worry that they might be put in jail for their many crimes, so they have to do an even more off-putting strip so that a few days later, when newspapers print a strip where a Marvin grins smugly after voiding his bowels into his diaper and everyone around him recoils in disgust, the average reader thinks, “Well, at least this one isn’t about a dog contemplating a human’s genitals” rather than picking up the phone and dialing 911.

Mary Worth, 2/26/24

“It seems he’s a bachelor no more … so amazing that he’s managed to have a 20-year-old daughter in a just a few weeks!” Toby is just 100% zooted to the gills.

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Shoe, 2/16/24

I was about to start this post with “Sorry I’m the Perfeser facial expression parser now,” but why should I apologize for that? You, my faithful readers, have specifically chosen to point your browser to josh reads dot com, the Comics Curmudgeon, or have perhaps even paid to receive post from that domain via email, so surely you of all people want the facial expressions of a clinically depressed cartoon bird man explicated to you, in a curmudgeonly way. Anyway, today’s strip is about how the Perfesser, in addition to being very depressed, is an alcoholic. You can tell because he looks like he wants to die in the first panel but after downing a tumbler of liquor in the second, he looks like he’s on top of the world. It won’t last!

Gasoline Alley, 2/16/24

We still don’t know what the shocking news in Gasoline Alley is, but we’ve heard characters talking a lot about how shocking and disturbing it is, and now Walt is going on a hunger strike, so I’m assuming it’s something like “LOCAL VET OF WORLD WAR I STILL ALIVE, GOVERNMENT SCIENTISTS AIM TO HARVEST HIS BLOOD TO CREATE IMMORTALITY SERUM”

Marvin, 2/16/24

“Our readers love it when we talk about Marvin pissing. Love it! But like all fetishists, they always need to escalate. What they want to see now is Marvin being pissed on. There’s nothing that the millions of sickos who read Marvin want more than to think about a toddler who’s simply covered in dog piss” –the Marvin creative team, who must be stopped, by the intervention of the U.S. military special forces if necessary